Illusionist David Blaine's Electrifying Stunt is Shockingly Safe

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In his latest stunt, illusionist David Blaine plans to make his
body a conduit for an electric current flowing between two
high-voltage electrodes for three days straight. The magician
says he'll face off with 1 million volts in what he told the
Daily News would be his "most dangerous" feat ever, but at least
one MIT physicist won't be losing sleep over Blaine's safety,
saying the trick seems mostly risk-free.

A
trailer for the stunt, which is set to begin on Manhattan's
Pier 54 on Oct. 5, shows Blaine standing at the center of a dark
room, his mesh bodysuit lit only by two fluttering arcs of
electricity emanating from his outstretched arms.

If the teaser gives any indication of what will actually
transpire next month, Blaine's odds of besting death in the trick
he calls "Electrified: One Million Volts Always On" are pretty
good.

"He has a conducting suit, all the current is going through the
suit, nothing through his body," said John Belcher, a physics
professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a
co-investigator on a plasma experiment aboard NASA's
Voyager 2 craft. "There is no danger in this that I see. I
would do it, and I am 69 years old and risk-averse. I just would
have to take a nap."

Blaine's safety during the stunt will rely on an altered version
of a piece of technology that has been around since 1836, when it
was invented by a mostly self-taught English scientist named
Michael Faraday. The device, called a Faraday cage, is a hollow
shell or mesh frame of conducting material.

Faraday realized that when exposed to a current passing through
an external electric field, such an enclosure would distribute
charge on its surface in a way that resulted in no net effect on
the interior. In what is probably the earliest prototype for
Blaine's stunt, Faraday demonstrated this fact in 1836 by coating
a room with metal foil and standing inside of it while
powerful electric discharges flowed over its outside.

When Blaine dons his mesh suit, he "is just wearing the cage
instead of being inside of the cage," Belcher told Life's Little
Mysteries.

Blaine's choice to advertise the voltage of the electrodes he'll
be standing between, rather than the amperage of the current that
will flow through his Faraday suit, is perhaps somewhat
misleading. What directly concerns a human's risk of
electrocution is not voltage (in a common analogy, voltage is
likened to water pressure if electric current is thought of as
the flow rate of water through a pipe), but the amount of current
coursing through an electric field, measured in amperes, or amps.
And within an electric field of a given strength, the current
passing through an object will vary depending on that object's
resistance, a property governed by its material.

"I would have no fear of having 1 million volts between my head
and the soles of my shoes as long as I made sure my shoes had a
really, really high resistance," said Belcher.

Though the only immediate threat Blaine is likely to face during
the three-day stunt is fatigue, some of the subtle byproducts of
an exposed arc of current might actually pose a small health
risk, according to Belcher.

"He is surrounded by all these lightning discharges, [which]
would certainly emit radiation and there would be a lot of
ozone," he said." [That] might be a problem for three days."